President's Opening Day Address

September 3, 2013

Photo: Mike Peters

Montclair State University President Susan A. Cole

Good morning
everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the opening of the 2013-2014
academic year. For some of you, it is your first Opening Day at Montclair State
University; others have participated in the beginning of a new year for forty
years or more; and the rest of us fall somewhere in between. It is a positive
characteristic of our profession that, unlike other walks of life, we actually
do get to begin afresh each year, following the idiosyncratic seasons of our
own calendar.

It is perhaps
demonstrative of the nature of the academic mind that we have felt the need to
create our own calendar, finding the Gregorian calendar that governs most of the
rest of world somehow not adequate to our purposes. In addition to rejecting
the Gregorian calendar, we have eschewed as well all of the other 50 odd
calendars in use around the world, such as the Assyrian or the Hindu or the
Maya or the Zoroastrian calendars, and we have declined to resurrect one of the
fine old calendars no longer in use, such as the Aztec or the Byzantine or even
the old Soviet calendar that had 5- and 6-day weeks.

Thinking about
it, the old Soviet calendar might have been a good one for us. A quick peak at
Wikipedia, I confess to not having taken the time to go back to original
sources, tells us that from 1929 to 1931 the Soviets divided the year into 72
five-day weeks, three of which were split into two partial weeks by five national
holidays. The two parts of each split week still totaled five days—the one or
two national holidays that split it not being part of that week. But here’s the
key thing. Each day of the five-day week was labeled by a specific color, and
each worker was assigned a color, which identified his or her day of rest. The
colors vary depending on the source consulted or the surviving images of the
calendars. One source has days of purple, blue, yellow, red, and green, in that
order beginning on the 1st of January. Another source
says red was the first day, not purple. Other sources replace blue with either pink, orange or peach
and have a different order - yellow, pink/orange/peach, red, purple, and green.
A black and white calendar from 1930 apparently does not conform to any of
these because its red day is the fifth day of the week. In 1931, the Soviets
then decided to change from a five-day to a six-day week with another set of
complex rules. Here surely was a model that has every appearance of having
derived from a university committee, and one would have thought that this model
would have had great appeal to the academic mind.

But no, we have
instead created our own academic calendar, and every institution has one, and
every institution’s academic calendar is different from every other
institution’s academic calendar, and since there are thousands of colleges and
universities in the country, that makes thousands of different academic
calendars. And, of course, every year we all make some changes to our own
particular academic calendar, so we are never entirely certain what it is,
which of course provides material for debate, but then, as I am sure we would
all agree, anything that provides food for debate is, of course, a good thing.

However, what is
indubitably clear is that today is September 3rd, Opening Day, and, for reasons
not entirely clear, the beginning of our academic year. Although last year, it
was September 4th, and the year before that September 6th and the year before that September 1st. But
never mind. All this is just to say that, as chance would have it, we are all
in the right place on the right day, and it is a pleasure to see you all.

As for me, this
is my 16th Opening Day, and, having just completed 15 years as president
of Montclair State University, it seemed an appropriate time to reflect on what
we have accomplished over that period of time. There are many ways to approach
that question, but the way I looked at it was to assess what is here now that
was not here when I arrived 15 years ago. Here is a partial answer to that
question.

We have
approximately 6,500 more students than we had 15years ago. When we take
the official count on Census Day, the tenth day of the semester, we anticipate
our total student population will be 19,300. That number will include a
freshman class of about 3,000 students, about 1,400 new transfer students, and
close to 1,400 new graduate students. Undergraduate students have come from
every county in New Jersey, from 24 states, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C.,
and from many foreign countries. The top four choices of majors among enrolling
freshman students in order are: Psychology and Biology, which are running neck
and neck, Business Administration, and English. Our largest graduate programs
are in Counseling, Business Administration, Teaching, and Educational
Leadership.

Let’s meet a few
of our incoming freshmen:

Nathan Ellisgraduated from
Timber Creek Regional High School. With five AP and eight Honors-level classes
throughout his high school career, Nathan ranked among the top students in his
high school class. He served as a member of the National Honor Society and as a
mentor to his peers in various organizations. He has participated in leadership
programs and internship opportunities and plans to pursue a degree in Business
Administration with a concentration in Retail Merchandising and Management.

Owen Grovegraduated from
Communications High School in Monmouth County. Owen is a strong, well-rounded
student who has pursued an extremely rigorous curriculum and who has impressive
talents that extend beyond the traditional classroom. Owen is an independent
filmmaker who has been recognized at the Cinemadness Film Festival for his
films entitled Timeless and Dawn. He is a member of the Screen
Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. He
has appeared on Saturday Night Live, performed a voiceover for Game Boy, and
worked with MTV. Owen is pursuing a degree in Filmmaking in our new School of
Communication and Media.

Serena Kumalmaz graduated from
Saud International School in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. While there, Serena took
advantage of AP courses in Physics and Information and Communication
Technology, served as a member of her student council, school newspaper, and
theatre group and found time to volunteer in her community. Her academic
credentials are extremely strong, including a perfect 4.0 GPA. Serena will be
pursuing a degree in Geoscience, with a concentration in Environmental Science,
and hopes to attend law school and practice in the area of Environmental Law.

Nicole Massoudgraduated from
Paramus High School. She is a high-achieving student with many honors and AP
courses and served as the voice of Passaic High School, reading the daily
announcements, sports scores and schedules, and participating in school plays
and musicals. She successfully created a tutoring program in her school for
students with severe learning disabilities, and that program is now an
established option so that other high achieving students can follow in Nicole’s
footsteps, serving as tutors. Nicole will major in Mathematics, and her goal is
to become a Mathematics teacher.

Lynese Rawlins graduated from
Red Bank High School. Early in her high school career, Lynese founded Black
Girls Rock,an organization committed
to open dialogues regarding cultural competency issues and the sharing of
experiences with other students and staff. Inspired by her relationship with
her great-grandmother, as a sophomore, she founded her school’s chapter of GlamourGals, an organization with a
mission to inspire young women to forge strong bonds with mature women by
providing makeovers and manicures to women living in senior citizen homes. A
three-year class president, peer mentor, captain of the cheering team, and soup
kitchen volunteer, Lynese is praised by her principal as demonstrating an
uncommon “compassion and an understanding of others seldom displayed by a high
school student.” Lynese plans to pursue a degree in Political Science.

These are just
five of the over 3,000 entering freshmen, but they give us a good perspective
on why it matters that we have significantly expanded the opportunity for
talented students to attend the University. Most of you are aware that New
Jersey has long ranked at the bottom of the nation in its provision of places
for the state’s high school graduates in its public colleges and universities. Montclair
State has been at the forefront in the state in expanding access to public
higher education and that has meant more high quality opportunities for
students such as Nathan, Owen, Serena, Nicole and Lynese and their thousands of
classmates.

The University
now grants 2,000 more degrees each year than we did 15 years ago. In FY
2013, we granted 4,200 degrees. It is a matter of particular significance that,
while our enrollment has grown by about 52 percent, the number of degrees
granted has grown by almost 90 percent, which means that we are increasingly
successful at moving students through to degree attainment. Serious attention
to the implementation of strategies for student retention and timely graduation
has been an important theme over the past 15 years, which have been marked by
university-wide efforts to continue a path of improvement in these areas.

Every year, over
the past 15 years, in good budget times and bad (and mostly they were bad), we
have continued to invest in recruiting outstanding full time faculty to the
University, and we have increased the full time faculty by about 180 positions.
This September, we are welcoming a cohort of 25 new tenure track faculty. I
hope you will get to know them all – their bios can found online on the
Provost’s website, but here is a quick introduction to five of them:

Adam Patrick
Bell
is joining the John J. Cali School of Music to fill a position in music
technology. Professor Bell also brings expertise in music education and music
therapy. In addition to mastery of SSL
Duality consoles, API preamps, compressors and equalizers, Professor Bell has
done research with autism spectrum children in the Nordoff-Robins Center for
Music Therapy at NYU, played in two rock bands, and engineered and produced
albums for Toronto-based artists. He earned his PhD from NYU.

Jonathan Howell is joining
the Department of Linguistics. He has done fieldwork in the click languages of
South Africa, among Native American Objiwe in Canada, which is his country of
origin, held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Wagner Prosody Laboratory &
Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain at McGill University, and, most
recently, was assistant professor at Brock University in Ontario. He earned his
PhD from Cornell University.

Rashmi Jain is joining the
School of Business as the new Chair of the Department of Information and
Operations Management. Professor Jain was most recently an Associate Professor
at the National University of Singapore where she managed the program in
systems and design management. She earned her PhD in technology management at
the Stevens Institute of Technology. She is active in several national and
international systems engineering societies, including the International
Council on Systems Engineering and the IEEE Computer Society.

Nicole Panorkou is joining the
Department of Mathematics and Physics with a PhD in math education from the
Institute of Education at the University of London. Since 2011, Professor
Panorkou has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and post-doctoral fellow at
North Carolina State University working with a large NSF-funded DELTA II
research project team to build diagnostic assessments for concepts in rational
number reasoning for grades K-8 and, most recently, to develop learning trajectories
with which to interpret the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.

Chris Torres is joining the
Department of Counseling and Educational Leadership. Most recently, he held a position
at Hunter College, CUNY as a researcher and senior manager with their Relay
Graduate School of Education. Professor Torres earned his PhD from the Steinhardt
School of Education at NYU, where his research involved a critical examination
of teacher staffing and turnover in urban charter schools.

Over the past 15
years, we have followed a policy of regular and predictable replenishment and
incremental growth of the faculty. That policy has enabled us to provide a
continuing flow of new ideas and vitality for our instructional programs; it
has enabled us to bring new strength to the University’s research activities;
and, it has enabled us to make important adjustments to the faculty as
enrollment and programmatic priorities change over time. For this coming year,
38 new full-time, tenure-track faculty searches have been authorized across the
University, which will continue our investment in growing our faculty ranks.

The most
dramatically visible change in the University has been in the development of
critically needed facilities. The following are the major facilities that have
been added:

University
Hall added its lecture halls, classrooms, computing facilities, conference
center, student study areas, and, of course, its facilities for the College of
Education and Human Services. That critical academic facility increased the
University’s instructional capacity by approximately 40 percent.

The
Kasser Theater, the very one we are sitting in today, added an outstanding
performance venue by any standards and, in addition to providing space for our
excellent student productions and performances, made possible the creation of
the Peak Performances series that has established the University as a
recognized artistic center for the larger region, including New York City.

The
major renovation and expansion of the old Chapin Hall into a home for the John
J. Cali School of Music enabled the transformation of a severely
under-resourced music department into a top school of music in the region.

The
complete renovation and additions to the old Finley Hall to create the new Conrad
J. Schmitt Hall, provided state-of-the-art facilities for our instructional and
research programs in foreign languages and linguistics, as well as a home for
the innovative Mathematics Learning Center and a number of specialized spaces
for communications and media, including the University’s new radio studios.

Acquisition
and renovation of space at 1515 Broad St. in Bloomfield, five minutes from the
campus, provided outstanding instructional and clinical facilities for the Audiology
and Speech-Language Pathology programs in the Department of Communication
Sciences and Disorders.

The
George Segal Art Gallery, ingeniously carved out of the Red Hawk Parking Deck,
has enabled the enhancement of the University’s art collection and a program of
noted exhibitions.

Montclair
State has had a shortage of student residential opportunities since its
founding in 1908. In the early years of my administration, our residence halls
on campus were severely over-crowded and we were housing students in motels on Route
3. In recent years, we have added 3,150 new residence hall beds to campus,
including The Heights with 2,000 beds, the Village at Little Falls with 850 beds
and Sinatra Hall with 300 beds. For the first time in the history of the
institution, any student who wishes to live on campus has the opportunity to do
so.

For
many years, our thousands of students had to share a relatively small athletic
facility with our 17 intercollegiate athletic teams and our instructional
programs in exercise science and physical education. The new Student Recreation
Center, for the first time, gave our large student population a wonderful
fitness and recreational facility of their own, and, since the first day we
opened it, the Student Recreation Center has been used by over 1,300 students
every day.

The
University has historically had excellent early childhood programs, both for
typically developing children and those on the autism spectrum, but those
programs were housed in terribly inadequate facilities. Today, the Ben Samuels
Children’s Center provides a modern facility for our distinguished programs and
has permitted the expansion of those programs to serve more children.

Not
only was the campus historically short of classrooms and laboratories and
residence halls and performance spaces, it was also short of food, and it is
apparently the case that we share with our students a robust interest in
eating. To the minimal food service venues that existed on campus, we have
added Sam’s Place, the Red Hawk Diner, Café Diem, and, most recently, Guy Fieri
on Campus and the other venues at The Plaza in Blanton Hall, as well as Food on
Demand in Freeman Hall. We can now eat at Montclair State any time of the day
or night, and according to the food service statistics, we are doing just that.

As
much as we like to eat, we like to park even more, and, while I am not under
the illusion that we will ever be satisfied that we have sufficiently
convenient parking, we have done our best to keep up with the need, adding over
4,000 thousand parking spaces in the first three parking decks ever built on
campus – the Red Hawk Deck, CarParc Diem, and the Transit Parking Deck. In
collaboration with NJ Transit, we also built a second train station to service
the campus, and I am pretty sure that we are the only campus in New Jersey that
is served by two train stations.

With
the adherence to the original Spanish Mission architectural style of the campus
and the reconstruction and landscaping of College Avenue, the College Hall Plazas and surrounding areas, and many other outdoor areas around campus, we
have made a good-looking campus into one that is truly beautiful.

We can now add
to this list the completion of the University’s Combined Heating, Cooling
and Power Plant. For the past year, we have lived with the constant digging and
filling in of trenches throughout the campus, with a new hole in the ground emerging
almost every day, when and where you least expected it. That project was
completed this summer, and the University now has a modern, cost-effective, and
environmentally responsible energy infrastructure that will provide reliable
and redundant ways of generating and distributing power and heating and cooling
to the whole core campus. The system was built through a public private
partnership that requires our private partner, UMM Energy Partners, to maintain
and replace as necessary the entire infrastructure for the next 30 years.

After years of
working for a state bond initiative for capital facilities, and no campus in
the state was more fully engaged in that effort than Montclair State, our
success will now enable the construction of two new major academic facilities. The
Center for Environmental and Life Sciences will be a four-story, 108,000 gross-square-foot,
$55-million project that will support academic programs and cross-disciplinary
research in fields such as Sustainability Science, Pharmaceutical Biochemistry
and Medicinal Chemistry. It will contain teaching and research laboratories,
classrooms, seminar rooms, a 150-seat lecture hall, a vivarium, a microscopy
suite, and other research support facilities, and it will ease the College of
Science and Math’s other over-utilized buildings and enable their future
renovation.

The second
project, the new School of Business will be a 142,000 gross-square-foot, $66-million
structure, replacing the 40-year-old and wholly inadequate 49,000 gross-square-foot
Partridge Hall. It will be a 6-story building containing state-of-the-art
instructional spaces and technology, including computer labs, a financial
trading facility, market research and analysis capability, and distributed
learning opportunities, as well as appropriate spaces for executive education
programs and business partnership initiatives.

Obviously, the
students, the faculty, and the facilities are meaningless without an
increasingly vital portfolio of academic programs, and there, too, the growth
and development of the University has been quite expansive. Over the past 15
years, there have been extensive investments in new instructional and research
programs and resources, far too numerous to list, but consider, for example:

24
new baccalaureate programs

18
new master’s programs

The
university’s first seven doctoral programs

The
creation of the John J. Cali School of Music

The
creation of the School of Communication and Media

The
Passaic River Institute

The
PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studies

The
ADP Center for Teacher Preparation and Learning Technologies

The
Center for Autism and Early Childhood Mental Health

The
Microscopy and Microanalysis Research Laboratory

The
Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship

The
Center for Writing Excellence

The
Bristol Myers Squibb Center for Science Teaching and Learning

The
Research Academy for University Learning

The
Sokol Institute for the Pharmaceutical Life Sciences

The
Center for Cooperative Media

The
Red Hawk Mathematics Learning Center

Winter
Session

The
Science Honors Program

To support all
of these programs and their associated instructional and research needs, we
have made truly transformative and massive investments in the University’s
information technology infrastructure and computing resources for students, for
faculty, and for administrative support services. The Library has also
undergone a transformation from paper to digital resources, and whole new
structures have been developed to support the needs of a faculty that is
increasingly engaged in research and in the use of new instructional
technologies. Similarly, student academic support services have been developed
to meet the needs of a larger, more residential student population and the
University’s higher expectations in regard to continual improvement in the
important measures of student success.

If I have not
mentioned your favorite newly developed program, facility, or initiative, I
apologize, but the scope of even this very partial list and the very positive
and substantial change it represents, is very impressive. And it is even more
impressive when one remembers that this growth was achieved during a period of
historic declines in what was already very modest state support. These
accomplishments were the direct result of the University’s collective
determination to meet the higher education needs of the people of New Jersey,
and they grew out of a strongly-held sense of institutional purpose and mission
based on the University’s historic values. It is a fact that, in largest
measure, these achievements were effected without assistance from the state and
in spite of what has been the state’s fundamental disinterest.

For those of us
who have been here during this period of transition, one of the important
lessons we have learned is that we can do it. We have discovered something
about our capacity to achieve beyond our own, or anyone else’s, expectations;
we have surprised ourselves by how far and how fast we can go when we hold some
core goals and values in common and when we are willing to work together.

For those of you
who are new to the University, it will be difficult to understand how much
effort, determination, painstaking deliberation and analysis, flexibility of
mind, and just plain guts and courage it took by so many to effect this
transformation. You need to know that you are joining a community that has
gotten used to being on the move and that has the fortitude to live, not in the
secure recesses of the past, but on the advancing edge of the present. So, to
the newest members of this community, I say take a big breath, roll up your
sleeves, and get ready to contribute your creativity and sweat equity because
we are not finished. Until we reach the
day when we can say that we have done everything there is to do, everything we
can do, to contribute to the educational and intellectual betterment of the
society we serve, we will not be done.

For the faculty,
of course, your primary responsibilities relate to the scope and quality of
your teaching and mentoring of students and to the pursuit of important
initiatives in scholarship, research, and creative endeavors. For the rest of
us, our jobs are to do all that we can to manage the increasingly complex and
demanding tasks necessary to the creation of an environment in which those
activities can flourish. However, as we start this new academic year, I would
ask that we all keep two particular things firmly fixed in our minds. First, every
single person who works at this University has an obligation to do everything he
or she possibly can to assure the success of our students, and that extends
from engagement in recruiting students, advising them, challenging them and
providing them with a rigorous education, and ultimately assuring that they
continue their education, once started, and succeed in graduating in as timely
a period as possible. There is no person on this campus who does not carry that
responsibility.

The second thing
I would like us all to keep in mind is that it matters what happens to our
students when they leave Montclair State. We need to know where they are one
year later and five years later and fifteen years later. We are responsible,
when we develop curricula and offer programs, when we advise and provide
services, to know if we are doing the right things, and the only way to know
that is to know what happens to our students when they leave. Preparing our
students well for professions and further education, giving them the competencies
they need to survive and to contribute, is a responsibility carried by every
member of this community. This year will be the year when we will be asking
ourselves what it is we really know about our graduates, and what more we need
to know to test our assumptions that we are doing the right things.

Finally,
I would like to conclude by introducing an important initiative that will be
implemented this year. As members of the Montclair State University community,
we have a strong, clear vision of who we are and where we are going. We
understand the qualities and the values that set us apart from our competition,
including our passion and commitment to excellent teaching; our engagement in
focused research; our connections to the world beyond the University; our
vibrant and active community with a strong tradition of intellectual, artistic,
and athletic excellence; and our beautiful campus and stunning location just a
few miles from one of the world’s great cities.

However,
for those who don’t know us –
especially prospective students, potential research and educational partners,
and others beyond our immediate geographic area – it has proven difficult to
communicate the reality that is the present day Montclair State and our
distinctive position in the higher education landscape. After nearly two years
of research, including focus groups and surveys that touched thousands of
people, both within and beyond the Montclair State community, including many of
us here today, we have settled on a new approach to presenting the University that
we hope will convey its reality and complexity in a direct and compelling way
to a broad audience of our constituents. The fundamental message is: Montclair
State gives ambitious, motivated students the opportunity to succeed and lead.
In our classrooms, on our campus, and through our engagement in the world
beyond our gates, you will find everything you need right here.

The
new brand identity – It’s all here – incorporates the key strengths that have
helped Montclair State grow into the thriving university we are today. The
short video that you are about to see [below] will serve as an introduction to some of
the elements that will be in use to shape the look and feel of the University’s
public presence.

In
the coming months, you will see “It’s all here” on banners around campus, on
our buses, and in our advertising. As you leave today, you will receive a
package of what our anthropologists might call artifacts, compliments of the
Office of University Communications, which will help you show your pride in,
and spread the word about, this extraordinary University.

I
wish you all a productive and satisfying new academic year, and I invite you to
proceed to the Amphitheater just outside to enjoy some lunch and a little time
with your colleagues.